The Night Counter (23 page)
Authors: Alia Yunis
PARIS? YOGA? COSTA
Rica? Fatima was frightened. Could it be that her favorite grandson, even if he married Tiffany, didn’t love Lebanon any more than he cared about the Tigers and the Lions?
Scheherazade handed her the pills on the tray.
“Amir didn’t even wait for me to swallow them,” Fatima said. She flung the tray into the garbage.
Scheherazade let the pills fall but swooped down to retrieve the letter. “Shall I read it?” she offered.
“I need to focus on the house and Amir,” Fatima said, lashing out. “I don’t know this person, so how can her letter help with those matters?”
Fatima picked up the phone, but as she dialed, the static and clicks on the phone made her decide to hang up. “Ibrahim is probably asleep, anyway,” she said. “
Inshallah
, by tomorrow the phone will be okay again.”
“Why don’t you tell me another story of Ibrahim,” Scheherazade suggested.
“Maybe the phone in Detroit is having problems,” Fatima said, distracted. “That makes more sense. Probably he forgot to pay the bill. I’m usually the one who remembers and—”
“Fine, I will read the letter,” Scheherazade interrupted, and pulled out her own nearby glasses from her bra. “This will be today’s story.”
“You can’t read English,” Fatima said.
“The language of love and anguish is universal,” Scheherazade said. “Those are the only letters people still write in their own hand.”
Scheherazade opened the letter with the edge of her gilded silver compact. Then she let herself slip into the world of the letter so that she could see it being written and best know how to read it. The writer was as tiny as Fatima, but the bump on her nose was much smaller.
DECIMAL SAT ON
her hands to make it harder to scratch the itch on her neck. She hated wearing Shetland wool— even Hello Kitty sweaters—in the summer but didn’t want to catch a cold from the medical center’s air-conditioning system. She owned barely any summer clothes. It was such a short season in Minneapolis, and she spent so much of it in doctors’ waiting rooms, that she didn’t have much use for shorts and tees. Maybe air-conditioning was another reason not to start as a premed student next year. Medical school classrooms—especially anatomy ones—were very cold.
According to the
Newsweek
she had read at the eye doctor’s last week, she probably would live to be a hundred even with all her allergies. Did she really want to spend the next eighty-three years of her life freezing indoors? She’d most likely work to the bitter end because according to the January issue of
Money
magazine at the dermatologist’s office, it would take that long to get a decent portfolio.
Decimal looked at the only person not looking at her, a pale woman reading the greasy, creased May issue of
Good Housekeeping
, from which Decimal had cut out the dairy-free brownie recipe the previous day.
“One-fourth miserable, one-third bored, another one-third mildly hopeful, and the remaining one-twelfth miscellaneous and stuff,” Decimal whispered to her mother, Brenda, and discreetly pointed at the
Good Housekeeping
woman.
Mother and daughter were just seventeen years apart, and so they enjoyed many of the same waiting room games. Brenda had invented this game at the ear specialist’s when Decimal was five; it was called “Guess Exactly How Happy That Person Is.”
“Nah, I’d say two-fifths bored, one-tenth happy, and one-half worried shitless,” Brenda figured.
The personality analysis never got much more upbeat. Although Decimal and Brenda felt comfortable in medical plazas, they knew ordinary people didn’t come to doctors’ offices for the joy of it. They never ever found out which one of them was correct.
“We can’t ask them how unhappy they are because we got manners and stuff,” Brenda had explained to Decimal when she was six years old. “We’re high-class people even though everyone can see clear as day that I screwed up.”
Decimal understood that Brenda couldn’t hide her screwup, which was Decimal herself, but believed that Brenda could dress a little more like she had class. Brenda was a stunner today with her strong, thick black hair tied in a fuchsia scarf and her cat eyes all done up in black eyeliner. Her long fingers made her zirconium ring look totally elegant. But her jeans sat too low for a mom, and her halter top exposed too much of her natural muscle tone. Brenda belonged somewhere, such as Florida, where it was ordinary to show off so much flesh. Someplace warmer, without a daughter who had to visit medical centers all the time. Decimal felt absolutely sure of this today.
“What do you think about the creep eyeing me up and down over there?” Brenda asked, readjusting her halter top to suit her cleavage better.
“Ninety-nine point five percent pervert,” Decimal said, which she said about any man Brenda mentioned. She figured that probably the perverts’ mothers liked them, and so she always gave them a half-percentage-point of nonpervert.
Decimal readjusted Brenda’s halter to minimize the breast exposure.
“It’s my Arab side that got this DD cup,” Brenda apologized. “I can’t help it.”
“They do breast reductions on the sixth floor,” Decimal said.
“We already spend enough time with doctors,” Brenda retorted.
Decimal pulled a pen and notebook out of her Hello Kitty bag. “I’d better start my homework.”
“We’ve been waiting here for like a hundred hours,” Brenda said, jiggling her leg up and down. “How much longer do you think it’ll take?”
“It’s only been thirty-seven minutes,” Decimal replied. “You can go home, Mom.”
“Are you eighteen yet?” Brenda bit back. “Since I remember when I got my stretch marks, the answer is no, so don’t tell me what to do.”
“Maybe you should go get some coffee and stuff,” Decimal suggested.
“Can I have some money?” Brenda asked.
Decimal reached into her Hello Kitty purse and handed Brenda five dollars.
“That ought to be enough,” Decimal warned, and flipped her lopsided black curls over and clipped them with a barrette. “And put on your coat if you’re going to go to the gift shop. It’s about 25 percent more freezing than here.”
“Okay, honey,” Brenda said, and bit a nail as she looked at Decimal. She pulled out the barrette and adjusting it to her liking “Want me to pick up your hay fever prescription down at the pharmacy?”
“Nah, we’ll do that after,” Decimal said. Her eyes rested on the red purse of a woman in equally red sweats with matching red hair. “How about we play What’s in Her Purse?”
“Let me get the coffee first,” Brenda said. Then she swaggered to the elevator so that the pervert was able to ogle her a little longer.
Decimal jiggled her knee the way Brenda had and looked back at the woman’s red purse. “Three lipsticks, two nail files, half a pint of water, seven multivitamins,” she mumbled to herself The game just wasn’t any fun without Brenda. Not much ever was. After a little more jiggling, Decimal took a notebook out of her backpack and stuck her iPod in her ear to listen to Prince. She chewed on her pencil, readjusted her glasses, sneezed, and then began to write.
To: Ms. Fatima Abdullah
Detroit, MI?
Dear Mrs. Abdullah,
We’ve never met, so you might find it strange to hear from me. If you’re reading this, it means I got your address from my grandmother (your daughter, Hala). Here goes my first snail mail letter ever. To you. What do you think of that? I’m hoping you’ll want to read it as I heard you’re really literary and always give your kids books with pretty covers for their birthdays.
First off, my name is Aisha, but everyone calls me Decimal because I’m good at math. My mom (your granddaughter Brenda, who I’ll keep calling “Brenda” instead of “Mom” so you don’t get confused) is pretty good at math, too, but most of the counting she does is predicting how long her latest boyfriend will last. I always guess, too. My guesses are closer to one month and hers are always closer to one year, and I’m almost always right. I don’t gloat over it because I wish the opposite were true. She’s a really good catch for a nice guy. Aside from me, she doesn’t have much baggage and I’m supposed to be in college next year. And sometimes, she’ll pick on other people behind their backs to make herself feel better, but they’re usually people on TV so that’s not such a bad habit.
Even if you don’t know Brenda that well, you probably know the real problem is that she has terrible taste in men. I wish
she didn’t. Then she’d have met someone and they probably would have had another kid. It can be pretty lonely being the only child of an only parent who goes out a lot. Especially when I’m too allergic to even have a cat or dog, unless you consider Hello Kitty. My grandparents—Gran (your daughter Hala) and Dr. Wang (Gran’s husband, although separated)—said the bad taste started even before Brenda met my father, like five years before that when she had a crush on Prince in the eighth grade and used to sneak into his old club downtown. The one on First Avenue called First Avenue. It was exceptionally logical for him to name it that, seeing as musicians are not very logical if I go by the ones Brenda dates. Brenda’s men are losers. Except my dad.
Do you know my dad (Tyrone)? Probably not. Brenda and he didn’t have a big wedding and stuff like that because as you know Brenda got pregnant with me their junior year of high school. She had to finish high school by doing a GED, and Tyrone worked at a Mobil owned by a bunch of Arabs. Kind of not so impressive when you think that all four of Brenda and Tyrone’s parents worked as doctors at the University of Minnesota, which is also where I was conceived. I’m just guessing that’s where I came to be. I don’t really want to ask, but having grown up practically on the campus, I know that there are lots of places two people could make a baby. Tyrone’s parents were very nice about me being born, but they didn’t like Tyrone falling into the cliché of unwed African-American teenage dad. So he married Brenda and was no longer unwedded but still a teenage dad. Gran and Dr. Wang wanted her to have an abortion. I would have been Brenda’s second abortion, and I think a second pregnancy really messed up her hormones and made her indecisive so in the end it was too late. Having me was her only option. She was going to put me up for adoption, but then Gran saw something on the news about how black kids never get adopted and get messed up in foster care. That’s when she told Brenda that she
would deliver me personally and that I would not be given away. And Tyrone’s mother convinced Brenda that she would never, ever get over giving me away and stuff. I personally think she would have gotten over it. She’s actually much stronger than most people suspect. Anyway, Dr. Wang was major pissed off at Brenda and Gran, even when Gran arranged for me to be born in a hospital far away from the U. hospital.
Brenda thought that at least when she married Tyrone, Dr. Wang would be happy. But he wasn’t. They were married such a short time, he probably doesn’t remember that she did make that effort. And that’s why my last name is not Wang, like Brenda, but Jackson, like Tyrone. I think that must make Dr. Wang happy at least.
Brenda told me once that Jackson is a slave name. I told Tyrone this when he took me and his other kids to Valley Fair one day and I couldn’t go on the Power Tower on account of my altitude sickness and then he spent a couple hours talking to me about slavery while his other kids got to go on the Corkscrew and Steel Venom and all the other rides that also make me sick and stuff. I told him white Jacksons must have had a lot of slaves to name because look at how many black Jacksons there are. Michael Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Reggie Jackson, Mahalia Jackson, etc. Tyrone still says that my Jackson Hypothesis made him so proud of how smart I was. He still calls it that so I know he was telling the truth.
Most of the time, Brenda and Tyrone get along pretty well, even better than most undivorced people. They have a lot in common—they’re both middle class kids of upwardly mobile minorities who became huge disappointments to their parents at the exact same time. So that—and me—has always bonded them. I have friends who say I’m lucky my parents are divorced and stuff. They have to listen to their parents fight all the time. That would suck. Tyrone and Brenda laugh a lot and like to say
“remember when.” Now, more than ever, I think about how the best times of their lives—you can tell it from the laughing—all took place in high school. Before I was born. I’m the same age now as they were when the best days of their lives ended.
I can’t help calculating things like this out. Not only Brenda and me, but Gran is pretty good at math, too, especially when she’s making a numerical list of all the things that Brenda has done wrong with her life. I love Gran, but I’m glad Brenda doesn’t make lists like that about me. Anyway, Gran put her math to good use becoming a doctor and stuff. And then she married a doctor, too. Brenda says that marrying a doctor is what every mother wants for her daughter. But Gran says that you didn’t like Dr. Wang, even though he was a doctor. If he wasn’t any nicer to you than he has been to me, I understand.
Brenda says not to take Dr. Wang not liking me too personally—just like Gran didn’t worry about you not liking Dr. Wang or Dr. Wang’s parents not liking her. If you didn’t already know that Mr. Wang (Dr. Wang’s dad, one of my great-grandfathers) didn’t like your family, I hope I haven’t offended you. I heard you all never met each other, as you and your husband, Mr. Abdullah, didn’t come to the wedding.
“Decimal, you’re not writing mean things about me in your diary again?” Brenda asked, and jiggled her leg. “That really hurt when I read the last one.”
Decimal stopped writing.
“I’m over that phase, Mom,” Decimal answered, and jiggled her leg, too. “Ms. Jorgenson says we’re supposed to write a letter to a distant relative to get to know them better.”
“So I suppose you’re writing to Dr. Wang.” Brenda laughed.
“No,” Decimal said. “I’m writing to my great-grandmother.”
“Honey, she’s dead,” Brenda said. “Don’t you remember that weird-ass funeral in San Francisco?”
“Not Dr. Wang’s mother,” Decimal said. “Gran’s mother.”
“I got no shortage of other relatives and stuff you’ve never met that you could write to instead,” Brenda suggested.
“I picked her already,” Decimal decided. “The letter is due on Monday, so leave me to get it done.”
“Do you think you’ll be ready to go back to school on Monday?” Brenda said, and jiggled her leg faster.
“Mom, your cell phone.” Decimal motioned to Brenda’s purse, which was ringing loudly.
“Thanks, baby. What would I do without you?” Brenda said, and reached in for the phone. “Brenda Wang speaking.”
Decimal saw two things pop out of Brenda’s bag with the cell phone: a Beanie Baby and the five dollars. Damn it.
Brenda stuck out her hand to Decimal, and Decimal gave her mother her pen.
